Man Pleads Not Guilty to Gun Charges : Courts: Prosecutors say there is no evidence that the Costa Mesa resident, arrested by a task force trying to smash an alleged skinhead plot, supplied weapons to a white supremacist group.

A Costa Mesa man arrested during a crackdown on Southern California white supremacists entered a plea of not guilty to two federal firearms charges Monday, and prosecutors acknowledged they may have wrongly created the impression that he supplied weapons to a white racist group.

Josh D. Lee, 23, was arrested last month by the same task force of federal agents who carried out a series of arrests in Los Angeles County aimed at smashing an alleged skinhead plot to foment a race war by killing Rodney G. King and bombing the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles. Lee has never been accused of being part of that plot.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Stephen G. Wolfe said that while Lee’s arrest grew out of the same investigation and “some announcements may have come from this office in which he may not have been adequately distinguished from the other defendants, there’s no direct evidence of his selling weapons to any of the co-defendants, or any members of the skinhead organization.”

“Based on everything we know,” Wolfe said, Lee “doesn’t have any white supremacist views.”

No additional charges are likely to be filed against Lee, who is free on $100,000 bail, Wolfe said.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Ronald W. Rose set Lee’s trial for Oct. 5.

If convicted, Lee faces a maximum of 15 years in prison and up to $500,000 in fines for possessing an unregistered sawed-off shotgun and a Colt .45-caliber pistol without a serial number.

“His crimes are indeed crimes,” Wolfe said. “It’s unfortunate that people think that he’s a white supremacist. That’s too bad, because it’s not the case.”

Lee did not comment on Monday’s proceedings, but his attorney, Morton H. Boren, said Lee was involved in shooting competitions and did not actually operate as a gun dealer, although he had a federal gun dealer permit.

Boren said Lee never sold any weapons to skinheads, but that he did sell a third weapon, a legal Uzi, to an undercover FBI agent.

It was the same agent who had infiltrated the Los Angeles skinhead organization that was allegedly plotting to trigger a race war by killing King.

Wolfe said that federal agents at first thought the Uzi was fully automatic, and thus illegal, but that turned out not to be the case.

Lee purchased the Colt at a gun show, Boren said, and believed it had no serial number because it was an old weapon, manufactured before serial numbers were required.